To Jesse, hunger was an everyday companion.

Jesse put his nose into the soft, warm steam. Only for a second. Then, like any hungry seven year old, he could hardly move his spoon to his mouth fast enough. His mom, Leslie, watched her brown-haired young son, her eyes filling, then brimming, then overflowing with warm tears. Relief. Humiliation. Pain. Confusion. Disbelief that Jesse was here with dozens of other children whose families were statistically labeled "below poverty level/working poor." Eating free meals. Jesse didn't understand either. Just as he hadn't understood why his ...

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Sacking hunger

Kirsten Day of Milton has a full plate with three children and her own business to run, but last spring, she decided to help make sure other people had full plates at mealtimes. Day launched a food drive in the Rowland's Hollow West I and II and Olde Rowland's Hollow neighborhoods. She began by stuffing the roughly 250 mailboxes with fliers asking people to leave bags of donated food by their mailboxes on Tuesdays. Then she drove to each mailbox and picked up the food Tuesday afternoons or evenings. She made so many stops, the brakes...

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School on an empty tummy

It was the little boy; the son of the late carpenter who had worked for me that drew my attention. He was supposed to be at school but was drifting aimlessly around the village, hungry and looking for some leftovers wherever they may be found. I was appalled and in typical human fashion I was trying to find someone to be angry with. I wanted to be angry with his mother. She it turns out could only manage to provide the eight children with one meal a day and that was in the evening. I tried to be angry with a lot of people. I wanted to find...

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The AIDS connection

I am in South Africa. I saw a TV programme yesterday on satellite TV about the suffering and deprivation of families hit by death and illness resulting from the AIDS pandemic. They don't get help because our president's position is that "a virus cannot cause a syndrome, which is a collection of diseases". Yea right, this is really helpful to the thousands sad, tragic and lonely deaths in backrooms and in some disgusting shantytown. When these people get sick it spells disaster for their families. Apart from the other deprivations there...

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